It is conventionally used to inspect some desquamated cells which are taken from patients in order to diagnose disease. This includes taking samples of desquamated cells (i.e., inspection-subject cells) from patients, making slides by Papanicolaou stain and slide enclosure, and first examining these slides with optical microscopes by screeners (i.e., cytotechnologist). Those slides of abnormal finding in the first examination shall be under second examination so as to finalize the result of diagnosis on lesion.
However, it takes a very long time in the examination because screeners should manually and individually scan a lot of slides. Further, because the number of qualified screeners is very small, it is unlikely to promptly resolve the problem of taking long time in the first examination.
Further, because the examination is done under screeners' experience and skill, the accuracy of the first examination may be affected by screeners' personal condition. Conventionally, being concerned with this issue, more or less 10% are randomly selected out of slides of normal finding in the first examination in order to review the first examination. However, this is only a means of error monitoring or a means of putting pressure on the screeners, which cannot solve the cause of the problem structurally.
Therefore, if there is an electronic means that may provide consistent and reliable first diagnosis results for a large number of slides, it may be possible to get accurate final diagnosis results without relying solely on the skills of the screeners. Further, if screeners are supplemented or replaced by filtering out 70˜80% of the large number of slides as no problem with inspecting the remaining 20˜30% of slides, the time required for diagnosis may be shortened.
Further, with development of electronics industry and computer performance, electronic means have also been introduced in the medical field. However, individual hospitals are only introducing various technologies in their own tests yet, which renders diagnosis technology inconsistent and insufficiently reliable. Moreover, because each of large hospitals individually utilizes diagnostic result data of their own, technologies that improve the diagnostic accuracy of the electronic means are not well equipped.
Further, because this process is very complex and requires a high level of computing power, data is transmitted to a dedicated server at a remote location so that data processing is performed through a dedicated algorithm. Therefore, it takes a considerable time to obtain the diagnosis result. In addition, when the internet connection is obstructed, it becomes impossible to utilize it.
The applicant has referred the following documents with regard to the present invention.
(1) Korean Patent Application No. 10-2005-0039468, “Apparatus and method for cardiac diseases diagnoses based on ECG using neural network”
(2) Korean Patent Application No. 10-2002-0047898, “Face recognition method using artificial neural network, and the apparatus using thereof”
(3) Korean Patent Application No. 10-2009-0117305, “Pulse diagnosis robot system and pulse diagnosis method using the same”
(4) Korean Patent Application No. 10-2009-0117303, “Method and apparatus for providing fault diagnosis based on fNIRS for persons of developmental disorder”